Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
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Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
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No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
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No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
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No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
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No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
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So, it appears that when giving everyone equal infrastructure, motorists are still awful at getting around.
The reason Dutch cyclists don't break laws is that there's little reason to. Their traffic signals work for cyclists, their paths work for cyclists, there's no reason to speed, etc.
Compare that to most cities in North America, and "breaking the law" for a cyclist means not wanting to wait 10 minutes at the same red light because there aren't any cars to trigger a change to green. Or riding on sidewalks because nobody feels safe on roads with semi-trucks and pickup trucks refusing to give them any space.
When motorists break the law, it's because they are impatient or just don't know how to drive. When cyclists do it, it's to either be safe or because the infrastructure is so poor that it makes normal cycling behaviour seem like a crime.
There's also a level of absurdity to cycling laws. E.g., in the UK if I:
That's legal. But! If I:
That's a crime.
The 'Stop on red' rule was obviously designed for cars and then slapped onto bicycles, a category of vehicle for which it makes very little sense.
Proof: intersections of multi-use paths don't have stop signs and don't need them.
We have a few municipalities around here that are adding stop lights for cyclists where multiuse paths meet intersections (to control the cross rides).
It's more of a safety thing, but I've almost been run over several times while crossing them on a WALK/BIKE green, since motorists really don't care at all.
You will often get a motorist committing to a left turn going into the cross ride, and since they didn't look first and didn't give themselves any time before the oncoming traffic arrives, they'll plow through the cross ride/cross-walk. To say that I see this happening all the time is not an exaggeration.
A place where two multi-use paths cross is entirely different from a place where a multi-use path crosses a street. The signal for the latter is still because of the cars, not the bikes, even if it's directing the latter.
That's a really rare sight to see in my region. I wish we had enough multi-use paths to actually have them cross! LOL
As a UK cyclist I can see that stopping at a red light definitely does make sense. I don't want to hit pedestrians and other road users who have been given a green light to cross my path.
You're no more dangerous cycling at 3kph than you are wheeling your bike at 3kph, but one of those things is illegal if you do it over a stop line, regardless of anything else you do once you're over the stop line. That's the absurdity.
Yeah, I say make them both illegal so the rules are more predictable and easy to understand.
Also, make it illegal to be outside. Too much mad shit going on out there.
The difference is that one will force you to actually stop, if even for just a moment. That can give you enough time to actually see oncoming traffic.
I don't get this. You slow down if you don't want to hit people. You also have a set of eyes. Are people not able to go "person walking in front, let's slow down and go behind them". If it's a wall of people, then of course you stop.
So then the pedestrians trying to cross the road have to judge whether the cyclist is going to stop, rather than assuming they will. Why not make the same rules apply to everyone on the road to be more predictable?
The solution is to design roads where these conflicts and confusions don't happen. For example, you can have a lighted pedestrian crossing for car lanes adjacent to a raised, unlighted crossing for the cycle lane.
Good point. Can't win them all. If life was perfect then a simple communication could be used if need be. If only people didn't wanna hit other people all the time or something.
The study in the article is from Denmark though. They never mentioned Dutch cyclists.
Fair point. I don't think it matters in this context.
The Dutch and Danes both have excellent cycling infrastructure, so it doesn't matter what place we're talking about, since the behaviour of cyclists (and motorists) is the same when given appropriate infrastructure.
@Showroom7561 @frankPodmore Having recently cycled across the Netherlands, I can report that Dutch drivers frequently break the law and are a danger to everyone (including themselves), just like drivers everywhere else. While Dutch infrastructure is safer than most places, drivers remain a major threat to health and life.